The Nature of Discrimination — US Segregation and South African Apartheid Compared

Both the United States between 1954 and 1965 and South Africa between 1948 and 1964 were societies in which a racial minority in power, or a racially defined ruling group, used law, custom, and violence to deny basic rights to people classified as non-white. Studying the two systems side by side is the heart of this prescribed subject, because it lets you see how discrimination was built, justified, and enforced in two very different political settings.

Segregation in the American South

After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Southern states rebuilt white supremacy through a web of state and local laws known collectively as "Jim Crow." The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson gave these laws constitutional cover by ruling that "separate but equal" facilities did not